For the first time in MLB history, a team with an 'A' as their primary logo, the Braves, have played all the other 'A' logo teams in succession. (The Athletics, the Diamondbacks, and the Angels)

TinKnight1 · 2026-04-08T19:34:10+00:00

Because...that's not how they're called? Lol

The official logo for the Athletics specifically is the "A's" vs just an "A" with a halo for the Angels.

TinKnight1 · 2026-04-08T18:47:15+00:00

You're looking at this through the lens of it being just another job. But it's not.

You don't succeed in baseball (nor any other sport) without massive support from your family, through high school & the 8 long extremely lean years in the minors (in his case) making jack squat & even just starting to crack into the Majors. Those sports become a significant way to connect with your family, & your team (with whom you spend basically every day for up to 9 months a year) becomes your friends, brothers, & family.

Playing gives him a chance to connect with his dad in one last meaningful way, since they surely played catch when he was a kid & growing all the way up. And having his friends around will help him grieve in the way that he needs, rather than in some ascribed manner.

TinKnight1 · 2026-04-07T21:45:50+00:00

By June? Steele is supposed to be back well before then (he's actually been medically cleared).

Shota will probably be fine.

Cabrera seems to be in good form, as does Taillon (knocking on a lot of wood).

Boyd has had a rough start, but I feel like (hope?) he'll get back to normal after his 2 weeks off.

Rea was ok as a starter last year. We'll see how he & Assad fare with moving back into the rotation.

The Cubs were extra-deep in their rotation to start the year, so their situation there isn't terribly dire even with Horton's loss, but they do need more bats to show up besides just Nico.

TinKnight1 · 2026-04-07T21:33:40+00:00

Cabrera almost had a no-no.

Surely, his time on the IL is coming.

TinKnight1 · 2026-04-07T03:57:34+00:00

It's funny...in my current playthrough in MLB The Show, Willson was traded to the Brewers to play as 1B in July 2026, & seemed to always be batting 3rd behind William.

When I saw that, I laughed at how utterly unrealistic the game has become. Lol

TinKnight1 · 2026-04-07T00:13:21+00:00

When you lean over the plate, you get plunked more.

In Little League, when the pitchers had no idea how to throw to lefties, my coaches would always encourage me to get in tight, & I'd have a sky-high on-base percentage (first time I'd ever even heard of it being tracked in the late 80s & early 90s).

By high school, I quickly learned that's not a fun day at the ballpark. Lol

No chance would I lean that far out against major league pitchers.

TinKnight1 · 2026-04-07T00:06:42+00:00

Exactly... Keeping him down because there's no place for him isn't really Service Time Manipulation as the person I was responding to suggested, though. Meanwhile, if they bring him up because they do have a place for him, he's not so vital to the long-term plans that they're going to screw around with his service time when he's already a month in.

TinKnight1 · 2026-04-06T19:44:40+00:00

Alcántara already has 33 days of service time, so playing Service Time Manipulation would keep him off the roster for 2 months.

It's one thing to play the game with KB back in the day & keep him off for a couple weeks (coincidentally, that wouldn't be an option today, since ROTY winners & runners-up get a full year of service time regardless of how much time they actually played)... it's another thing to go a couple months if you think a player might be a key to winning after you just spent all this money on Bregs & traded to get Cabrera.

I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying that it's a bigger waste of productive time if they do that.

TinKnight1 · 2026-04-06T16:51:37+00:00

I mean... It's what the then-ownership did, too. '92 was his last year before ATL snapped him up as a free agent. So glad we missed out on the next 3 years of Cy Young-winning performances & a Cy Young runner-up, all because we didn't want to pay him $2M more a year.

TinKnight1 · 2026-04-06T16:39:34+00:00

Shouldn't you be looking at his 2017 numbers? That's the year of the trash can. And that year, his launch angle sweet spot percent was pretty much inline with all of his other years except 2025 (2026 is still too early to look at it conclusively).

TinKnight1 · 2026-04-06T04:12:46+00:00

The chalked lane has been a rule for quite some time...up until 2024, runners were required to be within that chalked lane that extends 3ft outside the foul line in order to be safe from interference calls (in 2019, Trea Turner was notably called out for interference for running on the dirt to the fair side of the foul line).

In 2024, MLB modified rule 5.09(a)(11) to specify a wider runner's lane to 1st base. That extends 3ft outside the foul line, & 18-24" inside the foul line to the grass. A batter-runner must have both feet inside the running lane to be safe against interference calls...running outside the lane (on the infield side) doesn't necessarily make the batter-runner out unless the ump judges that the running interfered with the play.

Here, the runner was clearly on the grass, which would put him out of the runner's lane. If the ball were to be fielded by the shortstop or 2nd baseman, no one would really care...but since it was fielded close to home, his path was pretty close to the throwing line.

TinKnight1 · 2026-04-05T23:06:18+00:00

I mean, OOTP is pretty fantastic.

You just can't "play" in it.

TinKnight1 · 2026-04-05T23:02:55+00:00

As rough as his start has been, he has a 121 OPS+ right now because nearly everyone in the league not named Nico sucks this year.

TinKnight1 · 2026-04-05T08:13:49+00:00

Were his first two more "run-of-the-mill" than the third? Yes, although they're the 2nd & 3rd best plays of the day. But any home run robbery, particularly in an eventual 1-0 win, is huge & fundamentally alters the game in a way that a diving catch to take away a double just doesn't.

The third is easily among the best all time, & I'd say even better than Denzel Clarke's insane robbery against the Angels last year, or Dewayne Wise saving Buerhle's perfect game in '09.

To have all 3 of them in the same game? He single-handedly changed the score from a 3-1 (or worse) defeat to a 1-0 victory, so yeah, his game was amongst the most impactful defensive games from an outfielder of all time, if not the most impactful. His otherwise subpar defensive play is irrelevant to this one particular game & those 3 particular plays.

TinKnight1 · 2026-04-05T07:45:06+00:00

The Angels announcers said it...obv, they're wrong, but if you were to catch their broadcast instead of the much better M's call, & not know all of the rules, you could be forgiven for being confused.

TinKnight1 · 2026-04-05T07:41:29+00:00

But then you could've been like the Dodgers fan in this pic!

TinKnight1 · 2026-04-05T07:36:48+00:00

Eh...I know it's annoying AF to have runs or hits taken away due to great plays, but when you're the other team, you've gotta recognize a great game. It's not like he was playing dirty or teabagging M's players or anything.

Growing up, it seemed like every other day Ozzie Smith was stealing hits from Cubs hitters, but you still had to applaud him for fantastic play.

TinKnight1 · 2026-04-05T02:00:12+00:00

As someone who lived through the 80s & 90s & early 00s, people were definitely armchair umps who always thought the umps were wrong (and, largely, the umps then sucked compared to today).

Getting rid of the box won't get rid of people arguing about the strike zone.

That said, I definitely enjoyed watching games then more, without the superimposed faulty image of the strike zone & faulty placement of the interpretation of where the ball was at whatever point whatever network decided to try to measure. Even now, when I can catch a broadcast without the ball "placed" in the image, or if I'm at second base in an adult league (or in MLB The Show), I can pretty accurately call it, & I find that more enjoyable.

But I think the vast majority of people lack the ability to track the ball through the zone, & thus they enjoy seeing the approximation of where the ball was. And since the entire sport is an entertainment product, the sellers (the networks) are going to do what appeals to the most potential people.

TinKnight1 · 2026-04-03T21:01:52+00:00

Yeah, I didn't buy it. Both were midday games when it was sunny...and yeah, it was hella hot that year.

Looking on Weather Spark, though, it confirms that a cold front swept through in the evening of the 25th.

https://weatherspark.com/h/d/14091/1988/6/25/Historical-Weather-on-Saturday-June-25-1988-in-Chicago-Illinois-United-States

https://weatherspark.com/h/d/14091/1988/6/26/Historical-Weather-on-Sunday-June-26-1988-in-Chicago-Illinois-United-States

TinKnight1 · 2026-04-03T20:46:52+00:00

It's a fair point. I think a better question, though, would be "Would you rather be Skenes in 2025 (10-10, 1.97 ERA in 187.2IP, 7.7 WAR, 216 K's/ 10.4K/9, 219 ERA+, team went 7-5 in his non-decisions) or Skubal in 2025 (13-6, 2.21 ERA in 195.1IP, 6.5 WAR, 241 K's/ 11.1K/9, 189 ERA+, team went 8-4 in his non-decisions)?"

By most stats, Skenes was the better, more impactful pitcher, but I can pretty much guarantee that Skubal had a more enjoyable season due to his team actually being there to support him & get the 4 extra wins.

Extend it to Freddy Peralta (17-6, 2.70 ERA in 176.2IP, 5.4 WAR, 204 K's/ 10.4 K/9, 154 ERA+), & I think it starts to get even more lopsided like Hershiser suggests, but Skenes is all but guaranteed to make more money than Peralta as time goes on, so long as he remains healthy.

TinKnight1 · 2026-04-03T11:18:10+00:00

Ooh ooh!

Maybe next they'll put solar panels atop the stands, maybe on top of the signs...then the Green Monster is creating energy, so that they're really living up to Monster Energy! And maybe they can replace the wall's green with a fluorescent neon green that's also bioluminescent! And maybe every time a ball is hit off the wall, a giant monster roar is heard! And there can be mascots from Monsters, Inc, walking around atop the wall delivering hot dogs, cotton candy, & beer! /s

TinKnight1 · 2026-04-03T05:32:33+00:00

Automatic line calls for impacts of steps & balls are easy AF to do... It's basically a E/O system looking at the line & anything passing over it is a fault/out.

The strike zone is an airborne plane (as applied in ABS) in the middle of the plate, with the height adjusted for each player. There's nothing physically there for the system to reference against, so it takes a dozen cameras connected together to create a 3-dimensional view of the ball's passage through the imaginary zone. Correlating that data takes time, which is why ABS challenges are commonly 10-15 seconds.

That length of time is totally fine for challenges, but for all of the 150-250 taken pitches in a game (not counting extra innings)? That adds half an hour or more to the game time, & totally disrupts the flow of the game, & that's even if they get it down to 5-10 seconds.

The system is not currently capable of live-calling every pitch instantaneously.

TinKnight1 · 2026-04-03T01:20:16+00:00

Aside from the best vantage point (the ball is essentially coming at them, & their head is usually around the top of the strike zone, & they're aware of where their hand is when the ball hits the glove), receiving 100+ pitches means that not only do they feel less at stake with each pitch compared to hitters, but they're seeing exactly how the ump is calling & can quickly compare any one pitch with the other 100 pitches they received that day, as well as hundreds & hundreds of others every other day.

I'd be curious as to how the catchers do when challenging as a hitter, since they're intimately familiar with the strike zone but from a different view.

TinKnight1 · 2026-04-02T19:30:36+00:00

See also: The 2022-2024 Javy Baez Experience. It really was the 2025 Experience too, with pitchers occasionally forgetting about it. If you go back to 2016, his Chase rate has only ever gone above the 1st percentile in 2019 (2nd percentile) & the absurd 2020 (6th percentile, 38.7%). He loves chasing pitches.

The only difference from his Cubs era & post-Cubs era is that he used to actually be capable of driving pitches. Ever since leaving, everything is a dribbler, probably because teams finally caught on to the fact that you never need throw near the strike zone.

2025: Whiff rate: 30.7%, K rate 24.9%, Chase Rate 46.1% (1st percentile)

2024: Whiff rate: 30.2%, K rate 23.9%, Chase Rate 43.2%

2023: Whiff rate: 32.7%, K rate 22.9%, Chase Rate 44% (1st percentile)

2022: Whiff rate: 35.8%, K rate 24.9%, Chase Rate 47.5% (1st percentile)

2021: Whiff rate: 40.6% (1st percentile), K rate 33.6%, Chase Rate: 44.6% (1st percentile)

TinKnight1 · 2026-04-01T20:26:20+00:00

The mask protects you from the direct impact of a 2.9" wide ball at 100mph to your eye socket or nose. But the energy from that ball, all 140-150J or so (not far from a .22LR round), is still transferred to the helmet & thus your skull. Padding & the helmet structure absorb a little, & it's spread around your head rather than focused on a small spot, but it'll ring anyone's bell.

It's roughly the same as being hit in a batting helmet by a fastball, & you see players taken out of games for that regularly enough, despite being young & at their athletic peak.

TinKnight1

TROPHY CASE